In 1970 Gary Brooker asked me to produce Procol Harum's fourth album,
Home. By now the line up consisted entirely
of ex-members of the 60s R&B group The Paramounts. The most unsettling
port of any recording session in those days was always achieving the best
sound on each instrument – my aim was hopefully to make the instrument
sound better in the control room than in the studio itself, as wished for
by The Troggs on their legendary documentary recording of a recording –
'I've got a fucking sound in 'ere ...'

When you are about to cut a new track and you just want to get on with
it, you don't really want the producer to ask the drummer to hit the snare
drum for the next 15 minutes in order to analyse or correct what needs
to be done, so copying what I'd seen at Beatles sessions where they would
go through their old favourites, I asked Procol to play anything they liked
while we did what we needed to do. Gary was and is totally in his element
singing this kind of stuff and I was quite happy to listen and not interrupt,
even once we were ready to start the song we had to cut that night. From
this was born the idea of hiring a studio for one night to put their old
repertoire down.

A few months after Homewas released
we booked Abbey Rood No 2 from 7 pm to 7am to record as much as we could
and have a laugh in the process. We put Gary's vocals through a PA in the
studio complete with Watkins copycat echo and invited Jack Lancaster from
Blodwyn Pig to play sax and gave each song one take, including a new song
that the boys had written specifically for the night. By 6.30 am they started
Keep a Knocking – you can hear the results – time for bed.

Sometime later during the construction of Air Studios in Oxford Circus
they were giving the Neve desk in No.1 a trial before the studio area was
completed. I took the tapes in and mixed about a dozen of my favourites
and took a seven and a half inch copy for myself.

A few years later Roger Scott at Capitol Radio heard of these tapes,
and I lent them out for broadcast, never seeing them again until Gary phoned
me a couple of weeks ago to tell me he had found some tapes and did I know
anything about them. Well, they are my long-lost copies which you are listening
to now.